BROKEN ARROW — President Barack Obama alone is to blame for the nation’s budget deficit – and just about everything else, U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe told the Broken Arrow Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday.

“We now have a president, and I don’t mean this disrespectfully, who is destroying these very institutions that made America great,” Inhofe, R-Okla., said.

Inhofe went on to say the Obama administration has “disarmed America,” is solely responsible for the federal budget deficit, mostly responsible for the nation’s dependence on imported oil and suffocating business with regulations.

He also said Obama engineered the House Republicans’ ban on earmarks in order to give himself more control of the budget.

“When they came along with this moratorium, you have to let the president run everything,” Inhofe said. “They conceded that authority to the president of the United States, so that’s why the president was behind the whole earmark thing.”

Inhofe said the earmark ban allowed the administration to block a new $10 million control tower scheduled for Tinker Air Force Base.

He said military spending, as a share of gross domestic product, has declined during the Obama administration and criticized unflattering descriptions of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where terror suspects are held, saying, “You know the biggest problem for prisoners when they get to Gitmo? Obesity.”

Inhofe said the idea that prisoners have been tortured there was invented by Obama and others “to make you think something bad is happening in America — the same thing he does and others do when they go around talking about how bad America is.”

Inhofe said the deficit is Obama’s fault because “it’s the president’s budget. Period. That’s the end of it.”

He said the recent debtlimit agreement is a sham that does little or nothing to reduce overall spending. One solution, he continued, would be to repeal the health-care reform law, which he said is an example of “social engineering” designed to make Americans more dependent on the federal government.

Inhofe also cited extended unemployment benefits, saying he saw no reason for them in Oklahoma because the state has “virtually full employment.”

Inhofe laid out a long list of regulatory steps he said would cost taxpayers and employers billions of dollars in taxes and lost productivity, and said the country could be “totally independent from the Middle East in a matter of weeks, not years,” if the administration allowed unfettered oil and gas development on public lands.

Noting that he will not be up for re-election until 2014, Inhofe said, “Don’t misunderstand, (nothing) I’m saying now is for political purposes.”

Rick Perry a ‘mensch’

A self described Democrat, Friedman came in fourth in a six man race when he ran
against Perry as an independent in the 2006 Texas gubernatorial
election,

I have been quoted as saying that when I die, I am to
be cremated, and the ashes are to be thrown in Rick Perry’s hair. Yet, simply
put, Rick Perry and I are incapable of resisting each other’s charm. He is not
only a good sport, he is a good, kindhearted man, and he once sat in on drums
with ZZ Top. A guy like that can’t be all bad. When I ran for governor of Texas
as an independent in 2006, the Crips and the Bloods ganged up on me. When I
lost, I drove off in a 1937 Snit, refusing to concede to Perry. Three days later
Rick called to give me a gracious little pep talk, effectively talking me down
from jumping off the bridge of my nose. Very few others were calling at that
time, by the way. Such is the nature of winning and losing and politicians and
life. You might call what Rick did an act of random kindness. Yet in my mind it
made him more than a politician, more than a musician; it made him a
mensch.

These days, of course, I would support Charlie Sheen
over Obama. Obama has done for the economy what pantyhose did for foreplay.
Obama has been perpetually behind the curve. If the issue of the day is jobs and
the economy, Rick Perry is certainly the nuts-and-bolts kind of guy you want in
there.